'They are a creation by some entity to gain power and take money.'... please be specific, who would benefit and why? Anyone who wants power or wants to make money. Billions and billions of dollars are at stake. My dollars, your dollars. People have always been willing to lie, cheat, steal and kill for money and power. You were not specific. I challenge you to actually be specific. Name names and means. Because now you are following a standard pattern of fear: Unspecific enemies/dangers. I dare you to actually answer concretely.
The first one is that we don't get the max amount of quality out of our dollars. There's a large amount of quality available "for free", as the research (and my experience) shows that it takes as long time to create high quality as low quality software, because there's so much time wasted on debugging etc in the low quality case that the lowered development time does not pay off. Extremely high quality is a different beast, with greatly increased costs.
The second part is that the consumers do not know what quality they buy. Quality is a "negative feature" - consumers tend to assume it is there, and get annoyed when it isn't, and it's hard to acertain before doing a purchase and using the product. To make the market work ideally here, the purchasers should have perfect information. That's of course impossible, yet it's possible we could make things better with some sort of labelling system - if we could make a reasonable one (and that's a non-trivial problem in itself).
Another problem is that having high quality may not be a sales booster *even if the price is the same*. Having low quality means that users invest more emotions in their software as they learn to work around bugs etc, and that they are more afraid of testing other things, as they've had to invest so much in this software (and think they'll have to invest as much in a new type.) This skews the market away from rational self-interest (which would discount investment to present value, as in "don't throw good money after bad") and towards the lower quality variants.
I'm not sure how far from optimal this move the market; quite a bit, I think, but probably not as far as many people think.
This stuff is based on a legal idea that I consider to be incorrect: That the GPL is compatible with a 3-clause BSD license.
The assumption here is that reproducing the 3-clause BSD license goes under the first clause of the GPL:
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's
source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate
copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the
notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty;
and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License
along with the Program.
However, the BSD license includes more than just the disclaimer and copyright, specifically (for a 3-clause variant):
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
without specific prior written permission.
Reproducing the license in documentation can in practice be a significant restriction, something a coorporation I've worked for has noticed when we were working on an embedded device based on BSD source code. Reproduction of all these disclaimers (as opposed to keeping them just in the source code) is an additional restriction compared to the GPL, which is in violation of the GPL section 6:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to
this License.
To me, this sums up to "GPL and BSD licenses are not compatible, period."
Now read the stuff in context: There was a claim that there wasn't suggestions of hate and intolerance in the bible. There is, and some of these are used today (for instance, the homosexuality quote I included). Fortunately, most christians disregard this and behave as good people anyway.
As I said, it is a question of *interpretations* of the bible. You are choosing to put weight on parts I happen to like, too, yet I still see people saying that homosexuality is a sin (which would fit under my definition of irrational intolerance, given that homosexuality is a frequent phenomenon in nature) based on one of the quotes I gave.
I don't see christians as generally filled with hatred. I see the bible as supplying ample material for those that want to be filled with intolerance and hate, and ample material for those that want to be what I see as good people, and which side you land on as being a question of how you interpret the bible.
I did. Here's some choice quotes with intolerance:
Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death. Such evil must be purged from Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:12)
If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives." (Leviticus 20:13)
A man or a woman who acts as a medium or fortuneteller shall be put to death by stoning; they have no one but themselves to blame for their death. (Leviticus 20:27
They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman. (2 Chronicles 15:12-13)
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. While he was on his way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him. "Go up baldhead," they shouted, "go up baldhead!" The prophet turned and saw them, and he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two shebears came out of the woods and tore forty two of the children to pieces. (2 Kings 2:23-24 NAB)
And relevant in context: Cursed be he who does the Lords work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood. (Jeremiah 48:10)
The bible advocates hate and intolerance. Now, many *interpretations* of the bible remove that hate and intolerance, but if you'd actually read the bible, you'd know that there is plenty of hate and intolerance to disregard.
In practice, it isn't his invention that's getting protected - it's just a monopoly granted against others inventing in the same area. The patent database is almost never referenced. (Also, in the medical field, there's very often public money involved to start with...)
I consider the numbers in that comparison so deeply flawed that they can't be used for comparing density of two languages like this.
In my experience, Ruby is about twice as dense as Perl *in direct translation* (I have taken Perl libraries and translated directly to Ruby). It is even more dense when the code is idiomatic Ruby - that might be up to 10x. Idiomatic Common Lisp is about as dense as Ruby.
Yet, Perl comes out at 15 and Common Lisp comes out at 5 in that "programming languages comparison", and Java comes out above Common Lisp at 6. These results are completely ridicilous. They probably have some statistical correlation with reality for some kinds of programming with some kind of developers - they're just far from exact enough to be useful for specific language comparison, like you do above. (They're also a decade out of date.)
(1) wasn't meant as a problem; it's the only reasonable step. The problem is that MySQL silently mess up in so many cases.
When I have a database, I do not want it to silently mess up. This is doubly true for foreign key constraints, as it is non-obvious when these are messed up. Whether it is a good idea or not to have an index on a particular column is irrelevant: What I am protesting is SILENT IGNORE. This seems to be something that's missed by MySQL fundamentalists, who always come up with some set of random excuses addressing something else.
I also happen to believe I am better qualified than anybody else for selecting what indexes I want in a particular database I'm designing, which none of you others know the purpose of nor the update frequency of nor the join frequency of. It's a good rule of thumb; it's a lousy requirement.
Oh, and I'm perfectly aware that MySQL can power cool stuff - I have used it a ton myself (as an inherited database too expensive to replace, mostly). That doesn't mean that it doesn't suck compared to PostgreSQL (in my experience), and IMO is popular mostly because of being insecure by default (thus easy to install), being incompatible with the rest in subtly icky ways ("embrance and extend"), and due to semi-falsified benchmarks a long time ago (MySQL AB published only the benchmarks where they were best, varying what benchmarks they displayed by what database they were comparing against, giving the impression that the they were "as good or better" in all performance areas.)
No, it is the same referential integrity offered by
Declaring all your foreign keys
Marking all your MySQL tables as InnoDB, as otherwise (1) is silently ignored
Ensuring that you have specific indexes added for all your columns used as foreign key targets (or was that sources, or both?), as otherwise (1) is silently ignored.
Ensuring that your MySQL is compiled with InnoDB support, as otherwise (2) is silently ignored
In other words, the MySQL referential integrity is a very different referential integrity, one that you cannot trivially see from the table declarations, only by carefully investigating the surrounding conditions.
Firefly popularity was to a large degree messed up by semi-random ordering of the episodes and semi-random playtimes on Fox. So treating the cancellation as lack of interest due to internal issues is not really appropriate; there were external factors heavily influencing this.
I meant exclusively state-subsidized. Bad formulation from my side. (I generally like having the market involved in things, as it's usually a great optimizer, but the research side does not seem to work at all well.)
As far as I remember, the ratio has been estimated at about 3:1 for marketing compared to research. That's hard to find data for (ie, Google didn't answer me inside a minute), though. (The $600 million estimate in another answer is off, BTW - it's supposed to be $1700 million, factoring in costs of failed drugs.)
Personally, I've slowly changed my stance on the patent system from "It's slightly off" to "We should abolish it". I used to hold out for pharma, but I've come to the conclusion that the way the pharmaceutical side runs now is a big waste of resources, leading to lower quality care than you'd get if we used state-subsidised (ouch) research instead. My girlfriend, who is an MD, agrees with me.
BTW, patents are public record -- they are all publicly available on the USPTO website.
Yes, and looking at that site to find if you cross a patent is dangerous, because there's a tendency to interpret problems as "willful infringment" if you do, and that gives triple damages (I don't know if that's exact or approximate.)
How do you propose to perform your test? If others "skilled in the art" already know that there is a solution, then you are injecting hindsight into the equation, and EVERYTHING is obvious once you have hindsight.
If just knowing there is a solution makes the solution obvious, it's likely that granting a patent isn't in the public interest.
Microsoft has been convinced of abusing that monopoly to extend into other business areas.
In other words, the courts has found your "surely agrees" to be false. Are you brave enough to learn about what a monopoly is, how the economics around one work, how "network effects" work and how this lock in a monopoly, and how Microsoft has abused various forms of licensing to lock in a monopoly, which will lead to you changing your mind? Do you even dare to say "I don't know enough about this given that I say "surely agree" for something that a court has decided against. I'll be proud enough of myself to decline to have an opinion until I learn more." - or is that too hard for you, is stepping back and saying "I was wrong to form an opinon" so emotionally painful that you'll instead continue having opinions in areas where you don't know enough?
You are an american or from Australia, or from some not-quite-western country.
OK, that's a cold read; my point is that politics isn't played as dirty in Europe as it is in most other places. It's actually possible to trust cross-political groups to try and be fair. Not all are, yet many are, and doing unfair handling is seen as a big deal, as sticking a knife in the back of the people. Gerrymandering and other forms of sanctioned election cheating are seen as unacceptable here.
So, you objection tend to fall based on a different culture.
There's plenty worse things you can say - in particular, I say that they are choosing to lie. I think what they are doing is stupid and evil.
This does not mean that I want the state to limit freedom of religion or freedom of speech - I think that's usually an even greater evil - yet I still consider what they are doing evil. It is pissing in the well of knowledge, destroying value by giving people incorrect beliefs, taking the cost of correcting them or the cost of people making bad decisions based on them.
And I call it lies because my evaluation is that anybody that actually takes the time to investigate the evidence (instead of trying to make the evidence fit a particular point of view) will, in my evaluation, end up seeing either evolution or God trying to fool us into believing in evolution.
Ah right. So anyone who disagrees with you must either have a large investment in XML, and must have clouded judgement. Way to argue!;/i>
Your attempt at mindreading failed, another cloud. I am stating my evaluation of how you argue: With clouded judgment. I am guessing this clouded judgment comes from having spent significant time on XML, and thus having an investment in it. You are arguing that both ways: You claim to have no investment and then start trying to get authority by referring to your experience with it. (I've got about 5/6ths as much IT experience as you, BTW, and while I've come across all those problems, I have also come across various other solutions to the structured data problem than XML, including the very nice standardized formats on the Amiga.)
To keep cutting down your arguments (though I'm not sure why I bother - I don't think you're going to dare to pull away your investment and see the flaws in XML anyway):
Your examples of XML application does not argue for cut/paste at all; it's processing done by a machine. I am in favour of having a standard, structured text format we can process - I just think XML is a horrible choice. It's bloated, denormalized for a proper hierarchy by the utterly arbitrary inclusion of attributes, and then, to add insult to injury, it can't represent graphs.
An utter arbitrary decision where you obviously do not get the arguments against it, and assume that you are supposed to argue in favour rather than try to understand the arguments. The argument is very simple: This introduce random denormalizing garbage into the format, instead of having a simple hierarchy. This complicates data structure consumers and it complicates data structure generators (adding noise to them) without, as far as I can tell, any benefits.
As for "actual experience showing benefits", I've got actual experience with XML messing things up. Most of the places where I come across it, it's the wrong thing for that application. It is used for configuration files, programming languages, and serialization. None of which it is a good choice for.
And to just deal with the last thing: Of course you can. XML is easily transformable - that is one of its major benefits. You can use XSLT to transfer your attribute-free format to one with attributes. You can also embed (if necessary) your format in other's formats with namespaces.
Adding one more layer of indirection is usually just asking for trouble. Doing this because XML has flaws in its design is usually stupid, especially as you can't guarantee trivial transformations due to that brokenness. So, no, I cannot avoid the fallout from that design mistake. Either I take the fallout in the form of adding more indirection, implementing the code for that indreiction, not being able to use the present documentation, etc - or I take the fallout in the form of having to deal with arbitrary noise being thrown into the data formats.
And no matter where I stand, I often have to debug other people's code. Where they have NOT thought that clearly around this - which is obvious, given that even you, with 30 years of experience in various formats including XML, do not get the point on the first explanation. Hopefully, you got it now.
YAML does not allow tabs, and I've not found the end of line issue to be a real issue the last decade. It was a pain back in the early 90s. I can also never remember having had any benefit from the ability to cut out a piece of XML and use it outside its scope - so this doesn't seem to happen much in practice.
Next, your arguments around attributes seems to also be clutching at straws. Let me shoot them down for you:
(A) If I am to use XML where XML is appropriate - that is, for the interchange of data - I can't avoid attributes because *other people are using them*. (B) Your attempt at arguing about screwups with tabs/newlines are shot down by yourself, as you then argue in favour of the messups that come from distinguishing between elements and attributes,(C) The verbosity argument is void - this does NOT argue for attributes, only that elements should be possible to write as attribute syntax.
Do you happen to have a large investment in XML? If so, you should think carefully through how much you are letting that cloud your judgment - because it seems like it is. (I work with XML and also with other technologies, and I don't let my investment stop me from seeing the flaws. There are flaws in everything, yet XML is one of the worst of the bunch, IMO.)
XML is horrible to human-parse. If you think XML is OK for human parsing it is because you've not seen real file formats. I've freakin' worked with structured *binary* formats that was usually easier to interpret than most XML (the IFF - interchange file format - for the Amiga).
XML is shitty to deal with because it separate "attributes" and "elements". Avoid attributes. They are an abomination unto Nuggan. Oh, and I'd also like back references and a simpler format - but then again, I'd end up with YAML and could just as well just ditch the XML.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who wants power or wants to make money. Billions and billions of dollars are at stake. My dollars, your dollars. People have always been willing to lie, cheat, steal and kill for money and power. You were not specific. I challenge you to actually be specific. Name names and means. Because now you are following a standard pattern of fear: Unspecific enemies/dangers. I dare you to actually answer concretely.
Eivind.
Subject says it all.
Eivind.
The first one is that we don't get the max amount of quality out of our dollars. There's a large amount of quality available "for free", as the research (and my experience) shows that it takes as long time to create high quality as low quality software, because there's so much time wasted on debugging etc in the low quality case that the lowered development time does not pay off. Extremely high quality is a different beast, with greatly increased costs.
The second part is that the consumers do not know what quality they buy. Quality is a "negative feature" - consumers tend to assume it is there, and get annoyed when it isn't, and it's hard to acertain before doing a purchase and using the product. To make the market work ideally here, the purchasers should have perfect information. That's of course impossible, yet it's possible we could make things better with some sort of labelling system - if we could make a reasonable one (and that's a non-trivial problem in itself).
Another problem is that having high quality may not be a sales booster *even if the price is the same*. Having low quality means that users invest more emotions in their software as they learn to work around bugs etc, and that they are more afraid of testing other things, as they've had to invest so much in this software (and think they'll have to invest as much in a new type.) This skews the market away from rational self-interest (which would discount investment to present value, as in "don't throw good money after bad") and towards the lower quality variants.
I'm not sure how far from optimal this move the market; quite a bit, I think, but probably not as far as many people think.
Eivind.
The assumption here is that reproducing the 3-clause BSD license goes under the first clause of the GPL: 1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program. However, the BSD license includes more than just the disclaimer and copyright, specifically (for a 3-clause variant): 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 3. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. Reproducing the license in documentation can in practice be a significant restriction, something a coorporation I've worked for has noticed when we were working on an embedded device based on BSD source code. Reproduction of all these disclaimers (as opposed to keeping them just in the source code) is an additional restriction compared to the GPL, which is in violation of the GPL section 6: 6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
To me, this sums up to "GPL and BSD licenses are not compatible, period."
Eivind.
Eivind.
I don't see christians as generally filled with hatred. I see the bible as supplying ample material for those that want to be filled with intolerance and hate, and ample material for those that want to be what I see as good people, and which side you land on as being a question of how you interpret the bible.
Eivind.
Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death. Such evil must be purged from Israel. (Deuteronomy 17:12)
If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives." (Leviticus 20:13)
A man or a woman who acts as a medium or fortuneteller shall be put to death by stoning; they have no one but themselves to blame for their death. (Leviticus 20:27
They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman. (2 Chronicles 15:12-13)
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. While he was on his way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him. "Go up baldhead," they shouted, "go up baldhead!" The prophet turned and saw them, and he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two shebears came out of the woods and tore forty two of the children to pieces. (2 Kings 2:23-24 NAB)
And relevant in context: Cursed be he who does the Lords work remissly, cursed he who holds back his sword from blood. (Jeremiah 48:10)
The bible advocates hate and intolerance. Now, many *interpretations* of the bible remove that hate and intolerance, but if you'd actually read the bible, you'd know that there is plenty of hate and intolerance to disregard.
Eivind.
Eivind.
In my experience, Ruby is about twice as dense as Perl *in direct translation* (I have taken Perl libraries and translated directly to Ruby). It is even more dense when the code is idiomatic Ruby - that might be up to 10x. Idiomatic Common Lisp is about as dense as Ruby.
Yet, Perl comes out at 15 and Common Lisp comes out at 5 in that "programming languages comparison", and Java comes out above Common Lisp at 6. These results are completely ridicilous. They probably have some statistical correlation with reality for some kinds of programming with some kind of developers - they're just far from exact enough to be useful for specific language comparison, like you do above. (They're also a decade out of date.)
Eivind.
I also happen to believe I am better qualified than anybody else for selecting what indexes I want in a particular database I'm designing, which none of you others know the purpose of nor the update frequency of nor the join frequency of. It's a good rule of thumb; it's a lousy requirement.
Oh, and I'm perfectly aware that MySQL can power cool stuff - I have used it a ton myself (as an inherited database too expensive to replace, mostly). That doesn't mean that it doesn't suck compared to PostgreSQL (in my experience), and IMO is popular mostly because of being insecure by default (thus easy to install), being incompatible with the rest in subtly icky ways ("embrance and extend"), and due to semi-falsified benchmarks a long time ago (MySQL AB published only the benchmarks where they were best, varying what benchmarks they displayed by what database they were comparing against, giving the impression that the they were "as good or better" in all performance areas.)
Eivind.
In other words, the MySQL referential integrity is a very different referential integrity, one that you cannot trivially see from the table declarations, only by carefully investigating the surrounding conditions.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Personally, I've slowly changed my stance on the patent system from "It's slightly off" to "We should abolish it". I used to hold out for pharma, but I've come to the conclusion that the way the pharmaceutical side runs now is a big waste of resources, leading to lower quality care than you'd get if we used state-subsidised (ouch) research instead. My girlfriend, who is an MD, agrees with me.
Eivind.
Yes, and looking at that site to find if you cross a patent is dangerous, because there's a tendency to interpret problems as "willful infringment" if you do, and that gives triple damages (I don't know if that's exact or approximate.)
Eivind.
If just knowing there is a solution makes the solution obvious, it's likely that granting a patent isn't in the public interest.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Microsoft has been convinced of abusing that monopoly to extend into other business areas.
In other words, the courts has found your "surely agrees" to be false. Are you brave enough to learn about what a monopoly is, how the economics around one work, how "network effects" work and how this lock in a monopoly, and how Microsoft has abused various forms of licensing to lock in a monopoly, which will lead to you changing your mind? Do you even dare to say "I don't know enough about this given that I say "surely agree" for something that a court has decided against. I'll be proud enough of myself to decline to have an opinion until I learn more." - or is that too hard for you, is stepping back and saying "I was wrong to form an opinon" so emotionally painful that you'll instead continue having opinions in areas where you don't know enough?
Eivind.
OK, that's a cold read; my point is that politics isn't played as dirty in Europe as it is in most other places. It's actually possible to trust cross-political groups to try and be fair. Not all are, yet many are, and doing unfair handling is seen as a big deal, as sticking a knife in the back of the people. Gerrymandering and other forms of sanctioned election cheating are seen as unacceptable here.
So, you objection tend to fall based on a different culture.
Eivind.
This does not mean that I want the state to limit freedom of religion or freedom of speech - I think that's usually an even greater evil - yet I still consider what they are doing evil. It is pissing in the well of knowledge, destroying value by giving people incorrect beliefs, taking the cost of correcting them or the cost of people making bad decisions based on them.
And I call it lies because my evaluation is that anybody that actually takes the time to investigate the evidence (instead of trying to make the evidence fit a particular point of view) will, in my evaluation, end up seeing either evolution or God trying to fool us into believing in evolution.
Eivind.
Your attempt at mindreading failed, another cloud. I am stating my evaluation of how you argue: With clouded judgment. I am guessing this clouded judgment comes from having spent significant time on XML, and thus having an investment in it. You are arguing that both ways: You claim to have no investment and then start trying to get authority by referring to your experience with it. (I've got about 5/6ths as much IT experience as you, BTW, and while I've come across all those problems, I have also come across various other solutions to the structured data problem than XML, including the very nice standardized formats on the Amiga.)
To keep cutting down your arguments (though I'm not sure why I bother - I don't think you're going to dare to pull away your investment and see the flaws in XML anyway):
Your examples of XML application does not argue for cut/paste at all; it's processing done by a machine. I am in favour of having a standard, structured text format we can process - I just think XML is a horrible choice. It's bloated, denormalized for a proper hierarchy by the utterly arbitrary inclusion of attributes, and then, to add insult to injury, it can't represent graphs.
An utter arbitrary decision where you obviously do not get the arguments against it, and assume that you are supposed to argue in favour rather than try to understand the arguments. The argument is very simple: This introduce random denormalizing garbage into the format, instead of having a simple hierarchy. This complicates data structure consumers and it complicates data structure generators (adding noise to them) without, as far as I can tell, any benefits.
As for "actual experience showing benefits", I've got actual experience with XML messing things up. Most of the places where I come across it, it's the wrong thing for that application. It is used for configuration files, programming languages, and serialization. None of which it is a good choice for.
And to just deal with the last thing: Of course you can. XML is easily transformable - that is one of its major benefits. You can use XSLT to transfer your attribute-free format to one with attributes. You can also embed (if necessary) your format in other's formats with namespaces.
Adding one more layer of indirection is usually just asking for trouble. Doing this because XML has flaws in its design is usually stupid, especially as you can't guarantee trivial transformations due to that brokenness. So, no, I cannot avoid the fallout from that design mistake. Either I take the fallout in the form of adding more indirection, implementing the code for that indreiction, not being able to use the present documentation, etc - or I take the fallout in the form of having to deal with arbitrary noise being thrown into the data formats.
And no matter where I stand, I often have to debug other people's code. Where they have NOT thought that clearly around this - which is obvious, given that even you, with 30 years of experience in various formats including XML, do not get the point on the first explanation. Hopefully, you got it now.
Eivind.
Next, your arguments around attributes seems to also be clutching at straws. Let me shoot them down for you:
(A) If I am to use XML where XML is appropriate - that is, for the interchange of data - I can't avoid attributes because *other people are using them*. (B) Your attempt at arguing about screwups with tabs/newlines are shot down by yourself, as you then argue in favour of the messups that come from distinguishing between elements and attributes,(C) The verbosity argument is void - this does NOT argue for attributes, only that elements should be possible to write as attribute syntax.
Do you happen to have a large investment in XML? If so, you should think carefully through how much you are letting that cloud your judgment - because it seems like it is. (I work with XML and also with other technologies, and I don't let my investment stop me from seeing the flaws. There are flaws in everything, yet XML is one of the worst of the bunch, IMO.)
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.